Last Jedi stuff - part 1

This isn't all of it, but it's a start.  I'll write some more tomorrow.  In the meantime, here's this... 

Spoilers

Having finally seen The Last Jedi, I was free to take a look at what others were saying about it. I’d been aware that the film was proving controversial, by which people seemed to mean that almost everyone liked it apart from a tiny sliver of white men whose disapproval was creating the artificial impression of controversy, and who –paradoxically enough – probably also deny the existence of privilege. 

I won’t go into the objections of the tiny layer of voluble fanboys who decided to hate (or rather angst over) Last Jedi. I’m sure all that has been well covered elsewhere. But I will just point out one thing: the tendency to point to moments when the film took a stance or expressed a viewpoint and to see these as objective mistakes. 

It was, some say, a mistake to depict Luke in the way the film did. It was also, according to some, a mistake to depict Poe the way the film did, especially in his relationship to Holdo. It was a mistake to leave Snoke unexplained, and to kill him off. It was a mistake to reveal that Rey’s parents were nobodies, of no significance to the plot or mythos. And so on.

The ways in which these things are mistakes varies, but the basic idea of the mistake is a running theme in the complaints. The film is also too comedic, which was yet another mistake. It’s a comedy of errors, one might say. Though it lacks identical twins and cunt jokes.

Luke is depicted wrongly according to his established character. The mystery of Rey’s background is squandered. Etc, etc. The mistake is either a betrayal of some established bit of lore or characterisation (a continuity error of characterisation, basically), or it’s a bug in the storytelling mechanics, a bit of faulty engineering. 

This is all rather telling, and in ways that are pretty obvious really. 

We’re often dealing with people who see storytelling in terms of correct and incorrect decisions, with these measured against a kind of ‘instruction manual’ conception of how narrative works. This is, of course, a case of the porgs coming home to roost, since such a view of storytelling has such a purchase on the ideas of a couple of generations of fanboys precisely because of the slavish (if initially post-facto) devotion to Campbellian ideas about mythic storytelling that was championed by Lucas, and which turned out to be so unfortunately influential. The terminus of such a view of storytelling is the thoroughly disenchanted world of TVTropes, and the jaded, can’t-impress-me-I’ve-seen-it-all-before weltanschaung it represents and feeds. The irony of such a view is, of course, that in its fetish for cod pseudo-Deconstruction, it actually makes it harder for people to ‘get’ texts. It’s a classic case of reductionism actually. It seems to make so much sense. How do you understand something? Take it to pieces and look at how they fit together. Trouble is, not even actual machines are just the sum of their parts, and stories are far more like living things or natural processes than they are machines… and studying water molecules in isolation is a really bad way to understand rivers, let alone the social history of waterway navigation. If you follow me. If your impulse when approaching a text is to break it down into its component tropes – or its component scenes, or symbols, or anything really – you’re not going to see what the sum of the whole is doing. Texts are meant to be experienced as wholes, albeit wholes full of contradictions and differentiations, and which unfold temporally. But that’s the point. A text worth understanding works by gradually building a greater and greater total effect from the progressive development of its elements and their interactions. If you chop it up as it comes out, you end up with lots of nice little blocks which look easily graspable… but you end up studying each artificial block in isolation, and that’s a structure that you imposed on the text which also makes the whole text incomprehensible. You’ve cut it up into chunks that can’t interact with each other. There is something of this approach inherent in the fan approach to texts. Texts in the series are seen as bundles of propositions about the series, each of which must be tested against the rest of the series… which, in practice, means evaluating it in terms of its ‘success’ of ‘failure’, or ‘correctness’ or ‘incorrectness’, as judged against a databank of ‘facts’ about the series which the evaluator has stored in his head. The character of ‘Luke’ in The Last Jedi is not a nested and interrelated part of a text, needing to be interpreted as an aspect of the whole; he is a chunk/proposition that needs to be tested for his score of rightness or wrongness against the facts catalogued on Wookiepedia. 

Similarly, though in a distinct way, Rey’s parents. As of Force Awakens, they got categorised under the heading ‘Mystery’, which of course also meant that they were in ‘Pending’. There was no reason for them to be in it, even as a noticeable absence, if they were not going to be returned to and ‘resolved’. The resolution would have to take the form of a revelation, because that’s how stories work. You set up a mystery and then you provide a revelation. Stories are about the tactical withholding and disclosure of information. You can draw flowcharts. And, this being Star Wars, the revelation will probably be something to do with bloodlines and families and inheritance… because Star Wars is (this is another of those ‘facts’) a story about lineal destiny and family, etc. As it happens, Star Wars has indeed been obsessed with such things… but then confronting and circumventing Star Wars’ seemingly innate tendencies and obsessions is one of the tasks Rian Johnson evidently set himself when creating Last Jedi. It is dunderheaded to view the anti-revelation that Rey’s parents were insignificant drunks, and that Rey herself is ‘nobody’, as an error, a kind of glitch in the storytelling mechanics. It rests upon refusing to see the text for what it actually is, or to judge it by its own actual aims, or to even admit that it is a story with its own integrity, and instead to insist upon viewing it as another package of information about Star Wars which needs to be evaluated as correct or incorrect according to the fan fact-hoard. This view is why someone – albeit someone who subsequently apologised and explained that their thinking was skewiff at the time owing to chronic pain and meds, which isn’t something to laugh at – launched a petition to have Last Jedi de-canonised. Their complaint about it was that it failed the test of correctness or accuracy against which all new fact-packages have to be checked. It flunked the exam.

I’m being a bit harsh. Not all fans think this way. As I say, the people who disliked Last Jedi are in a minority that only looks significant because it’s so pink and penis-owning, and pink penises seem to confer an artificial impression of size and significance, despite all evidence to the contrary. Also, some people just didn’t like it – which is totally fair enough. 

Even so, I wanted to start with this issue because it’s a way in to thinking about what Last Jedi is up to.